Tim Sweeney emailed Gabe Newell calling Valve 'you assholes' over Steam policies, to which Valve's COO simply replied 'you mad bro?'
Valve is currently embroiled in a US antitrust lawsuit with Wolfire, a developer that alleges the Steam platform holder uses its position to unfairly crowd-out rivals and control game prices. Valve tried to have the suit dismissed, but in May 2022 the court ruled it could go ahead with some changes and enter the discovery phase: the juiciest part of the legal process where, among other things, plenty of internal correspondence from the companies involved is made public.
Among these documents are a couple of spicy exchanges between Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, and Valve's CEO Gabe Newell and COO Scott Lynch (first spotted by Simon Carless at GameDiscoverCo). The context for both exchanges is broadly speaking store pricing and specifically the commission that Valve takes on Steam sales, which are some of Sweeney's favourite topics. The first chain in 2017 is sparked specifically by a leaked comment from Steam's developer forum, in which Valve's Sean Jenkins mistakenly said Steam may start restricting the keys it gives to developers:
On August 12, 2017, Gabe Newell emails Tim Sweeney: «Anything we doing to annoy you? We’re guessing Sean Jenkins' public dumbness might be part of it.»
Sweeney replies to Newell and Valve's Erik Johnson saying he's not annoyed «and I've never heard of Sean Jenkins» (poor Sean). Then Sweeney adjusts his flight goggles and gets ready for takeoff on one of his pet peeves: the 30% platform fee on Steam. «There was a good case for [such fees] in the early days,» writes Sweeney, «but the scale is now high and operating costs have been driven down, while the churn of new game releases is so fast that the brief marketing or UA value the storefront provides is far disproportionate to the fee.»
Sweeney opines that, if you were to strip away the top 25 selling games on Steam, «I bet Valve made more profit from most of the next 1000 than the developer themselves made.» The maths to get there is 30% to Valve, 30% on marketing, and 15% on servers / engine
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